BIOGRAPHY

Birth and Early Life

As with many medieval persons of common stock, the day and even the year of Chaucer’s birth are unknown. He is thought to have been born in London sometime around 1340, and we do know he died in 1400. The year of his death is a matter of public record because, by the time of his death, Chaucer had spent most of his adult life in the orbit of the royal family and its prestigious courts. He wasn’t necessarily destined to end up at court, but his family was wealthy and well enough placed, both geographically and socioeconomically, to give him a good start. His father, Thomas Chaucer, was a prosperous wine merchant. London was then a burgeoning commercial hub—arguably the most active in Europe—and its power was great enough to necessitate royalty’s accession to the city’s wishes: London’s mayor rivaled the king in political and economic sway.

Among the ironically lucky events early in Chaucer’s lifetime was his father’s decision, in 1347, to relocate his family, including the young Geoffrey, outside of the city. Their move fortuitously took them out of London, and harm’s way, just before the Black Death—bubonic plague—struck. Contemporary chronicles and modern research put the plague’s devastating death toll between one-third and one-half of Britain’s population. As for London itself, a 2005 article in the journal Human Biology puts the population of London at 100,000 before the first wave of plague (1348-51)and 50,000 after the plague (Human Biology 77.3 (2005) 291-303). Although calculations vary, it is clear from many remnants of fourteenth-century material culture, such as manuscript illuminations, tombs, and currently excavated burial grounds, that the plague wreaked havoc on London. But the city’s importance as commercial center for Britain and Europe remained, and after the plague the Chaucer family returned to the metropolis to augment their fortunes and play a role in local politics.

Family connections got teenaged Geoffrey preferred to court as page, the first step for a royal servant being educated in the ways of aristocratic life. Chaucer first entered court service during the reign of King Edward III (1312-1377, r. 1327-77), but did not serve immediately at any of that king’s domiciles. Instead, Geoffrey was “preferred” to the court of the second of Edward’s five sons, Lionel (1338-1368). Chaucer took part in the consolidation of the prince’s court with that of his wife, the princess Elizabeth. As Chaucer became more accomplished in the courtly arts, he moved among princely venues, including the magnificent courts of the third of Edward’s sons, John of Gaunt (1340-1399), a powerful noble and father to the usurping king Henry IV (1366-1413, reigned 1399-1413). This Henry is the one who attained the throne of England, as William Shakespeare’s (1564-1616) second tetrol-ogy of history plays dramatizes, after forcing the abdication of Richard II (1367-1399) at the end of the fourteenth century, a year before Chaucer’s death. In the course of his work life, Chaucer served, and was recognized with substantial rewards from, all three of these kings: the aged Edward, the young Richard, and the usurping Henry.

Diplomat and Soldier

It did not take long for young Geoffrey to move up in responsibilities at Prince Lionel’s court. From page he became yeoman; from yeoman, esquire and that rank’s foreign service in international diplomacy. The traveling he did in his diplomatic role—he visited Italy, Spain, and France—immersed him in late medieval urbanity. The poetic sophistication upon which Chaucer’s iconic status rests derives in no small part from these travels as a young man on royal business. In his youth he saw the French city of Reims, near which he was captured and ransomed after four months of imprisonment. Such ransoming was a common practice among noble courts in the fourteenth century and, because their captors hoped to attain considerable sums in ransom, prisoners were well treated and not abused. Besides Reims and Paris, the increasingly urbane Geoffrey saw the major Italian cities of Genoa and Florence during the 1360s and traveled to Pavia and Milan in the 1370s. These cities exposed Chaucer to the rich international commerce and diplomacy, not to mention the aesthetic pleasures, the burgeoning Renaissance fostered there.

Poet

Chaucer’s success as diplomat paralleled his growth as poet. Influenced by the writings of Dante (1265-1321), Petrarch (1304-1374), and Boccaccio (13131375), whose works he could acquire as manuscripts through his travels,

Chaucer also found inspiration in the French poets Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377) and Eustache Deschamps (1346-1406), the latter of whom wrote to Chaucer letters that survive to this day. Following the styles of these accomplished men of letters, Chaucer wrote ballads attuned to the devices and conventions of courtly love and short poems touched with courtly pretensions, from love-longing to knightly endeavors. His greatest innovation, while prompted in part by his French and Italian literary influences, made him different from them: he wrote in his native, vernacular English.

Chaucer’s choice to write in English parallels Dante’s decision to write his major work, The Divine Comedy, not in Latin, despite its subject matter, but in his vernacular Tuscan Italian, the reasons for which he presents in his Latin work, De vulgari eloquentia (“On the eloquence of the vernacular”). Still, Chaucer’s choice of English over French went against tradition in England at that time. The business of England had been conducted in French since the Norman conquest of 1066; although “Saxon” survived, it was not the status language of commerce, the royal court, or even law. But Chaucer was no apologist for Saxon, either. He did not take up models available to him outside the court. English verse had relied on alliteration, rather than end-rhyme, for its meter and rhythm in the Anglo-Saxon period (fifth century-eleventh century), but Chaucer’s poetry, from his earlier works to his last, The Canterbury Tales, use end-rhyme and the syllabic count that governs poetry composed in the Romance languages. Why did Chaucer write in English? Perhaps he was moved by Dante’s arguments in De vulgari eloquentia; perhaps, court creature and diplomatic voyager that he was, he wanted to explore national identity produced through language. The reasons for his choice are both obscure and manifold, but the choice of English marks Chaucer’s iconic status. The creation and continuity of Chaucer’s iconic presence in later centuries depends, as did his initial choice of English, on intersections among monarchic power, national identity, aesthetic judgment, and the pleasures of English poetry.

The sweet courtly poems Chaucer composed—in English, of course—during his residency in the courts of Prince Lionel and John of Gaunt were practice runs for his longer dream visions. The dream-vision form was popularized by French poets, but its roots run deep in classical and biblical culture. Chaucer modeled his dream visions on those of his favorite French writer, Guillaume de Machaut, the previous generation’s most courtly exemplar and a favorite of Anglo-Norman nobility. Chaucer’s dream-vision poems situate him in the literary mainstream of his courtly circles. Most critics agree that Chaucer’s first dream-vision poem—the one that Paul Bettany’s Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale erroneously thinks William Turner will recognize—is The Book of the Duchess. Most consider the poem a commission from John of Gaunt to honor his late wife Blanche. Blanche had died in 1369, but Chaucer composed the poem, it is argued, for a later ceremony on the anniversary of her death.

William Turner’s ignorance of The Book of the Duchess in A Knight’s Tale may match the present audience’s: there are no YouTube Book of the Duchess videos. Chaucer’s current fame rests on his Canterbury Tales: 24 tales stitched together with a “frame narrative” of a pilgrimage and a tale-telling contest, the unfinished last of his poetic works in a career that spanned three decades. But Chaucer’s signature poetic traits, the ones current fans recognize in The Canterbury Tales, also appear in his earliest work. One feature of his early poetry well-attested in his later work is a spark of what moderns would call “realism” as well as an understanding of human psychology. In The Book of the Duchess, the grieving Man in Black is brought around to a confession of what his fulsome praise seemed to deny, that his love is dead; his admission brings a kind of relief. There’s an insistent dog leading the dreamer around, and even his nightclothes—actually, his lack thereof—are described in the poem. Although allegory was a preeminent mode in the literature Chaucer read, his own work plays with the tension between the real and the allegorical, making his poetry continually enigmatic but eminently re-readable. In addition, Chaucer’s early poetry features one of his literature’s most recognized traits: a kind of ironic distance, caught in a web of emotion, yet knowing and selfaware. Even in the midst of the conventions of love’s tribulations or Fortune’s turning wheel, the narrator in Chaucer’s poetry seems to have a tongue poised firmly within his cheek. This attitude on the part of a narrator marks all of Chaucer’s poetry; it’s the attitude for which today, from college classrooms to YouTube, Chaucer is justly celebrated. Not everyone reads such ironic distance the same way. This quality of Chaucer’s poetry—and maybe its positive critical reception by twentieth-century critics in particular—prompted critic Camille Paglia to denounce Chaucer’s chumminess of the “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” sort: she detests Chaucer’s enjoyment of the “in joke.” But there is no end of enjoyment to be taken in analyzing the connection between self and words parallel to the vagaries of court life that Chaucer’s poetry places in imaginative landscapes poised between fantasy and dreadful reality. The pleasures of such a stance involve readers today and may have been even more attractive to those embroiled daily in the tumultuous years, the 1370s, of one old king’s late reign and his grandson successor’s early years.

Service under King Richard II

Edward III had groomed his eldest son, Edward the Black Prince (13301376) to succeed him, but the prince predeceased his father following a long illness. Upon Edward III’s death in 1377, the Black Prince’s son Richard, at the tender age of 10, assumed the throne. Due to his youth it was suggested that Richard be ruled by a regency made up of his uncles, but fear of their power—especially that of the exceedingly wealthy and powerful John of Gaunt (Chaucer’s patron since Prince Lionel’s death in 1368)—was substantial enough to produce a unique configuration of councils, rather than uncles, exercising consultancy. But the uncles—John of Gaunt, Edmund of York (1341-1402), and Thomas of Woodstock (1355-1397)—still exerted the kind of influence that comes with wealth and position.

Chaucer initially served his new king through these avuncular branches of the powerful Plantagenet family. In 1378 he participated in diplomatic efforts to broker a marriage between England’s royal interests and the despotic Visconti family in Milan: the goal was to engage a Visconti daughter, Catarina, to the newly crowned young Richard. It’s hard to know how surprised Chaucer might have been when, in 1379, Richard II was affianced to Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor. A choice marriage, but not one with which Chaucer had been involved: we can only guess at his reaction to the engagement. He was, however, undoubtedly present at Richard and Anne’s marriage ceremonies in 1382.

Until his participation in marriage negotiations for the young king— Chaucer had accompanied an embassy to Paris in 1377 to explore marital options there as well as in Italy—his travels had been curtailed since 1374, when he was named controller of the “wool custom” and the “petty custom,” posts he held for some 12 years. While Chaucer kept books, per se, for both posts, he was not the actual collector of funds. Rather, he was the crown’s agent, assuring reliability, accuracy, and the king’s interests. Both customs positions required moral probity as well as commercial cognizance, and Chaucer’s designation for the posts demonstrates his utter immersion in the mercantile, political, and international issues of his day. Whether his new duties resulted from the king’s—or the king’s uncles’—desires to reward prior service or were a way to keep him in town, Chaucer’s day job resulted in continued connection to royal administration as courtly and commercial patrons gained their footing in a burgeoning economy. These commercial vagaries as crucible of character capture the poet’s attention, adding to his inspired explorations of the real in the allegorical and the allegorical in the real.

The Aldgate Years

To satisfy the needs of his new position as customs officer, Chaucer leased a dwelling above one of London’s city gates, called in its time Aldgate (now a London Tube stop). This situation, along with the access his administrative post necessitated, afforded Chaucer a front-row seat for the last events of Edward III’s reign and the earliest ones of Richard II’s, letting him follow the political machinations that accompanied this troubled succession of a preteen king.

Two more dream vision poems date from these years: The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls. The first allows us another glimpse of Chaucer’s constructed persona accosted by an eagle that grips him with its talons and flies away, only to engage the narrator in conversation about poetic fame. The bird-motif continues in the second dream vision, which, mimicking Chaucer’s diplomatic efforts, treats marriage and the making of a good union. Perhaps predictably, considering the failure of Chaucer’s marriage negotiations with the Visconti, the union of the male eagle and female tercelet, the poem’s ostensible goal, is deferred at the tercelet’s insistence. Chaucer’s marriage-themed dream vision, peopled with creatures, counterpoises the seemingly forced marriages in the final acts of Shakespeare’s comedies like Measure for Measure. Instead, the Parliament of Fowls puts off what had seemed the perfect pairing and ends inconclusively. Undoubtedly a finished work, the Parliament anticipates the unfinished nature of some of Chaucer’s later work, specifically the Legend of Good Women and The Canterbury Tales. In those instances Chaucer has left his audience with enduring mysteries, and speculation continues about his motives for writing what he did, how he did. Such inconclusiveness has added to his iconic status, just as indecision has assured Hamlet’s fame.

But the Aldgate years also saw the beginning of the poem on which Chaucer thought his legacy would rest. Troilus and Criseyde is a long epic poem retelling Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato, which is itself a treatment of the further adventures of the Trojan War as amplified by late classical and medieval poets’ many additional stories. Again we meet Chaucer’s created persona, a narrator both inquisitive yet bumbling, much like the narrator of the dream visions but wrapped into a narrative at once historical (the Trojan War), courtly (love achieved and frustrated anchors the plot), and philosophical. Many critics suggest that Chaucer had other reasons for injecting a philosophical strain into Troilus and Criseyde. One of his shorter poems suggests that Chaucer was at the time translating the late classical Consolation of Philosophy, a bellwether Late Latin text (ca. 521) that was adopted by Christianity for its messages about fortune’s seductive blandishments and free will’s Christian centrality. A good deal of the Consolation’s power derives from its dramatic situation. Its eponymous narrator sits in prison, undeservedly condemned to capital punishment. His capacious vision attempts to answer why bad things happen to good people. Chaucer’s translation hasn’t earned high marks on its own, but some think he translated the text as part of a drive to educate the young king Richard. Although Chaucer’s Boethius translation may not sing, his Troi-lus and Criseyde is a compelling masterpiece written in the stateliest English. Its accomplishments include Chaucer’s invention of a rhymed, metered poetic form, the diction of which is at once both English and classical. Chaucer had no English-language models for what he did with Troilus and Criseyde. But the poem reveals poetic achievement beyond vernacular linguistic invention. Chaucer imbues the poem with equal measures of insouciance—the narrator retains his admiration for Criseyde almost despite himself—and the gravi-tas of martial realities. Troilus and Criseyde is a poem even undergraduates can’t stop reading. Its enigmatic ending—Troilus, betrayed by Criseyde and now perched in the spherical heavens, looks down at the piddling earth and laughs—continues to provoke readers and evoke commentary.

The Rising of 1381

In typical Chaucerian fashion, however—meaning that neither motives nor outcome is unambiguous—Chaucer’s Aldgate years are known for a staggering event that makes virtually no appearance in his poetry. In June 1381 an enormous confederacy—variously called “rebels,” “lollards,” and “peasants”— surrounded the metropolitan city of London to press their claims against royal taxes and decrees that were the result of the Black Death. The taxation the rebels resisted included a poll tax of three pence per head—“poll”—payable to the royal coffers. The decrees, called the Statutes of Laborers, had frozen wages in favor of the nobility, to the detriment of landless peasants selling their ability to work in a market straitened by the enormous manpower losses of the plague.

For one warm summer week, London (pop. 50,000) was besieged by a rebel tumult: 10,000 people surrounded the city and milled about below the gate in which Chaucer lived. The rebels meant business: they executed the archbishop of Canterbury and burned the Savoy palace of Chaucer’s patron John of Gaunt. The shockwave of the Rising or, as it was called prior to 1968, the Peasants’ Revolt, reverberated in contemporary chronicles, which, to please royal masters, took pains to paint the rebels as dastardly and the nobles as wise. As it happened, the 14-year-old king Richard II rode out to meet the rebel leaders in Smithfield, outside Aldgate, and gave assurances, soon to be rescinded, of meeting the leaders’ demands. Once the crowds dispersed, the remaining rebel leaders were taken and executed, and a terrifying week in London’s history moved into legend. But, remarkably to modern ears accustomed to the concept of “newsworthy,” these events did not move into Chaucer’s poetry, with the sole exception of a glance at the perhaps legendary rebel leader Jack Straw, whose raucous voice is named and parodied in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” one of the Canterbury Tales. If we see Chaucer as primarily caring for his legacy as a poet, guided by Petrarch, Dante, Machaut, and Deschamps, and understanding literature as different from “the news,” then we might appreciate the subtlety he brings to his opinions, couched in his signature ironic distance. Our age of surveillance might suggest that Chaucer avoided “the news” because to engage with headlines posed a danger. But Chaucer’s poetic choices were, first and foremost, poetic ones, designed to engage his audience on every level, not just the most sensational.

None of this detracts from the simmering politics that animated Chaucer’s courts and inhabited London’s streets. There were those who attributed to the Rising’s rebel leadership an affiliation with a contemporary religious reform movement whose adherents were maligned by the obscure term “Lollard.” These social critics followed the reformist Oxford theologian John Wyclif (ca. 1325-1384), a prolific scourge of church leadership, especially the papacy, who voiced his disappointment at what he considered the Christian church’s failure to adhere solely to biblical traditions. Wyclif was no wild-eyed reformer: rather, during the heyday of his campaign in the 1370s he earned the protection of none other than John of Gaunt, Richard II’s uncle and, we should remember, an important patron of Chaucer’s. Gaunt’s role in Wyclif’s career resulted from the main political rationale of Wyclif’s reforms: to limit the role of clergy and church administration in the secular courts’ affairs. Canterbury Cathedral’s martyr Thomas Becket (ca. 1118-1170) had met his end defending the church’s prerogatives against those of the English king

Henry II (r. 1154-1189); the popular pilgrimage to Canterbury that frames Chaucer’s Tales commemorated this check on royal power (see the chapter on Thomas Becket). Wyclif, two centuries later, concentrated not on the Christian church’s triumphs but on its abuses. He targeted not only the papacy but the monasteries, the former looking rather bad in light of multiple popes, the latter evidently rich in land and other wealth that rivaled princely holdings. Although the rebels likely were supporters of Wyclif and familiar with his calls to reform, they burned the London palace of Wyclif’s protector Gaunt, probably because Gaunt’s wealth made him a target analogous to the rich monastic foundations Wyclif denounced. Gaunt himself was not harmed, but the rebels beheaded the politically powerful and perhaps rivalrous archbishop of Canterbury: the besieged nobles, cravenly but accurately, figured that the archbishop would serve to sate the rebels’ demand for a sacrificial victim. Although Gaunt lost his palace, he kept his head, and he remained one of the most powerful nobles in England—a fact not lost on his son Henry who, less than 20 years later, ascended the throne as Henry IV after forcing Richard II to abdicate.

Chaucer and Lollardy

Just as Chaucer’s attitudes to court intrigue seem to be—and not to be— written into his poetry, so his relationship to Lollardy’s theology and ideology has inspired enormous debate. In The Canterbury Tales, the pilgrimage’s Host, Harry Bailey, explicitly labels the Parson a Lollard. Critics have traced a fair amount of Lollard attitude in the sermon delivered by the Parson in his tale. But the Parson is no supporter of royal prerogative. The pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales travel to the tomb of Thomas Becket, defender of the Christian church’s prerogatives against royal administration. A pilgrimage to Canterbury thus memorializes the only check available on runaway kingly power and seems to support the Christian church. Yet the pilgrims with whom the narrator (Chaucer) travels, like the secular Lawyer and the religious Prioress, exemplify paradox and, frequently, irreverence, especially when the narrator lauds their character. We can ask, “Who exactly are the targets of Chaucer’s satire?” but then we have to question whether the label of satire fits at all. The Parson has the last word of The Canterbury Tales: is that also Chaucer’s last word, or does the unfinished nature of the Tales suggest otherwise? One of Chaucer’s patrons was John of Gaunt, both supporter of Wyclif and victim of the Rising’s fury. Like the ambivalences surrounding the Rising as far as leadership and rationale go, and the ironic distance Chaucer builds into his poetry, Chaucer’s nearly total neglect in his poetry of both the Rising and Lollardy—at least, in an overt fashion—reflects the perspicacity, position, and subtlety with which he, perhaps characterologically, endowed his work. The depth of daily life tinged with ideological controversy and the apparently dangerous nature of what may appear to a modern audience as theological niceties may go a long way to explain Chaucer’s decision to create and recreate a bumbling and obtuse caricature of himself as narrator for his dream visions, his epic poem Troilus and Criseyde, and his last great work, the Canterbury Tales. How interesting, in light of Chaucer’s iconic status, is the fact that we identify ironic distance as the signature trait not only of Chaucer but of an English literary mentality.

Chaucer in Kent

Like his father’s moving his family out of London just before the Black Plague hit, Chaucer’s decision to leave his positions with the wool and petty customs, as well as his rooms above Aldgate, was fortunately timed. Richard Il’s powerful uncles asserted their power over him between 1386 and 1387, citing Richard’s tendency to pick bad favorites and his inability to heed good counsel. They had parliamentary help securing their sway over the king just before Richard achieved his majority at age 21. To hamper the king’s power, they dismissed his favorites from office, even executing a number of them. Perhaps through reading Chaucer’s translation of The Consolation of Philosophy, Richard had learned patience—but not a rejection of the blandishments of worldly power. Richard waited 10 years before taking his revenge and regaining his royal clout. Part of his patient plan included Chaucer. In 1389, Richard II appointed Chaucer clerk of the king’s works, a post he held for three years. Whether Chaucer left that post because of Richard’s dissatisfaction or because of his own worries about Richard’s increasingly autocratic behavior (Richard had a famous row with the City of London in 1392) isn’t easy to discern. But leave it he did. After his stint as clerk of the works, Chaucer moved to Kent, most likely to Greenwich, seemingly out of kingly purview and in retirement, although he retained old and obtained new sinecures at the hands of both John of Gaunt and King Richard. These gifts and annuities, monetary and sustaining (one was a yearly tun, or large cask, of wine), seem to have been bestowed to reward Chaucer for his good labors. They also demonstrate that Chaucer remained in the good graces of seemingly rival parties.

Greenwich proved fertile for Chaucer’s imagination: it was here that Chaucer composed the poetry that for the twenty-first century, from YouTube to Canterbury animatronics (see “Chaucer and the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,” below), replays his fame. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are the poetry on which his modern iconic status rests. Yet The Canterbury Tales, like Chaucer’s other poetry, remain distant in action and import from the intrigue and revenge that closed the reign of Richard II. Between 1397 and 1399 Richard took his revenge on those who, in 1387, had hampered his power. He swept in to clean house, even imprisoning one of the uncles, Thomas duke of Gloucester, who died in captivity: his death can be laid at Richard’s doorstep. When Richard’s cousin Henry, son of John of Gaunt, challenged the noble who had imprisoned Gloucester and under whose “protection” Gloucester had been murdered—likely at Richard’s behest—the king banished cousin Henry. It seemed a prudent decision: banishment falls short of murder— killing John of Gaunt’s son would exact a price—and truncates a potential problem’s power. In this case, the banished cousin is the Henry who, at his father Gaunt’s death and Richard’s seizure of Gaunt’s fortune, returned to England despite his sentence of banishment (suddenly made permanent, rather than for a term of years, as Richard had originally decided), to rally disaffected nobles to his side in a bid to claim his father’s wealth.

Some historians lament Richard’s turn to autocracy—his choice to change a temporary sentence to a permanent one, solely on his say-so—and cite it as reason for his downfall; others note Gaunt’s son Henry’s only partially concealed aim for the throne. Richard’s abilities as monarch were debated in contemporary chronicles; the historians that Shakespeare read used Henry-friendly chronicles for their prose histories, and their opinions shape the playwright’s history plays. While these chronicles lament Richard’s increasing autocratic behavior and his reliance on poor counselors, Terry Jones of Monty Python fame has come to Richard’s defense, citing the powerful Henrician propaganda machine working overtime after the fact to paint Richard’s foibles and Henry’s nobility. According to Jones, today’s historians fall prey to Henry’s effective propaganda and continue to portray Richard undeservedly in a negative light. In any case, Richard’s fall from power was a cataclysmic event in aristocratic circles that dated their chronicles according to the year of a king’s reign.

During these controversies in the 1390s, Chaucer lived in Greenwich, remote from these tribulations as the different factions of Edward III’s progeny wrestled for power. But events like Gloucester’s arrest and death, the passing of John of Gaunt, and his son’s attempt to reclaim his inheritance swirled ever closer and with increasing political challenge as the decade wore on.

Return to London

Chaucer moved back to London in 1398 and formulated a long-term lease the following year for a residence within the precincts of Westminster Abbey. Terry Jones, Alan Fletcher, Robert Yeager, Juliette Dor, and Terry Dolan make much of this move to the abbey in their book Who Murdered Chaucer? (2004). They detect in this relocation Chaucer’s anxieties about the machinations of the resurgent Lancasters and Henry’s henchmen. Chaucer had been identified with Richard II, and the new Lancastrian monarch demanded fealty to Henry’s dynastic cause, despite the ambiguous grounds—other than force—he used for taking the crown. Chaucer’s move to London and then to church precincts at the height of these troubles indicates his desire for sanctuary in light of his former faithful service to Richard. As it happened, after Chaucer’s death in 1400, Richard II continued to plague Henry IV. Richard’s death was announced in 1400, but the ex-king’s “unquiet body,” as the Chaucerian scholar Paul Strohm calls it, served as a rallying point for anti-Henry, anti-Lancastrian forces. Only when Henry IV’s son Henry V (1386-1422, r. 1413-22) ascended the throne and, in the first year of his reign, ostentatiously put Richard’s body into a magnificent newly built tomb did rumors of Richard’s continuing existence evaporate.